Quotes About Reading

These quotes were suggested by Goodnightmoon subscribers in May of 2014.

“What is a great love of books? It is something like a personal introduction to the great and good men of all past times. Books, it is true, are silent as you see them on their shelves; but, silent as they are, when I enter a library I feel as if almost the dead were present, and I know if I put questions to these books they will answer me with all the faithfulness and fullness which has been left in them by the great men who have left the books with us.”
— John Bright

“Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.”
— Emilie Buchwald

“There is no substitute for books in the life of a child.”
— May Ellen Chase

“He who has a library and a garden, wants for nothing.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“So please, oh PLEASE, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away. And in its place you can install, a lovely bookshelf on the wall.”
— Roald Dahl

[the last paragraph]
― Roald Dahl, in The Giraffe, the Pelly and Me

“Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty. It should be offered to them as a precious gift.”
— Kate DiCamillo

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein, (1879-1955), Scientist

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles W. Eliot

“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”
— Margaret Fuller

“You may have tangible wealth untold.
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be –
I had a mother who read to me.”
— Strickland Gillilan

“He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.”
― John Green

“What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it thinks about education.”
— Harold Howe, former U.S. Commissioner of Education

“So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.”
— William James

“No matter where they go, children lost in books will always find their way home.”
— Paul Jennings

“There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.” }— Jacqueline Kennedy

“I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.”
― Harold S. Kushner

“Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.”
― Arnold Lobel

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend.
Inside of a dog, it is too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx

“It is, however, not to the museum, or the lecture-room, or the drawing-school, but to the library, that we must go for the completion of our humanity. It is books that bear from age to age the intellectual wealth of the world.”
― Owen Meredith

“Why, I can go most anywhere by reading a good book.”
― Mark Kimball Moulton, in Scarecrow Pete

“I’d never felt like this before, but that was all it took-if reading made me feel this way, I knew that I was hooked!”
― Mark Kimball Moulton, in Scarecrow Pete

“At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better.”
― Barack Obama

“God loves little children but especially those who return their books on time.”
― Frances O’Brien, Head Librarian

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” ― Anna Quindlen